The Girl from Hollywood (LARB Classics) - Softcover

Burroughs, Edgar Rice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940660475 ISBN 13: 9781940660479

Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019

Synopsis

In The Girl from Hollywood, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the legendary creator of Tarzan, turns his eye to the seamy underbelly of Prohibition-era Hollywood.
In this gritty tale of the Jazz Age, the Penningtons, a close-knit ranching family from the Santa Monica Mountains, and Shannon, a vulnerable young starlet making her way in Hollywood, find themselves ensnared in an underworld of contraband liquor and illicit drugs. Ashamed of her scandalous past, Shannon finds solace while visiting the Penningtons, but the predatory film director Wilson Crumb soon disrupts their peaceful existence in the hills.
A captivating thriller about drug addiction, manipulation, and other sordid Hollywood secrets, as well as the regenerative power of nature and family, The Girl from Hollywood remains as timely today as it was a century ago.

About this title

About the Author

Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American fiction writer best known for his celebrated and prolific output in the adventure and science-fiction genres. Among the most notable of his creations are the jungle man Tarzan, the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter and the fictional landmass within Earth known as Pellucidar. Burroughs's California ranch is now the center of the Tarzana neighborhood in Los Angeles. He died in 1950.

Steph Cha is a Korean American novelist and fiction writer, who has released three novels in the crime fiction genre about her detective protagonist Juniper Song, Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough.

Review

"How wonderful that the Los Angeles Review of Books has resurrected this forgotten classic set in 1920s L.A. that rings with timeless truth about Hollywood's twisted allure but also waxes lyrical about the rolling hills and canyons that Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan and Tarzana, once called home. The naïve starlets, dodgy directors, morphine addicts, cowboys, rum-runners, aspiring writers, and gentleman ranchers of a century past are vivid, flawed characters, and the precise, poetic descriptions of open land now ravaged by development and forest fires will make you weep. This is a melodramatic page-turner that by turns enthralls and shocks while presenting a keyhole into a vanished era with haunting resonance to our own. Drop everything and buy "The Girl From Hollywood." This is an imprint to watch, and as a student of L.A. history, I can't wait to see what LARB publishes next." ―Denise Hamilton, former LA Times reporter, crime novelist, and editor of the award-winning Los Angeles Noir I and Los Angeles Noir 2; The Classics short story anthologies
"This Hollywood story of 1924 by the creator of Tarzan reflects the tensions between the agrarian dream of California ― utopian life on the bountiful land ― and the tawdry modernity of the Jazz Age represented by Los Angeles: a cesspit of rapacious directors, the sex trade, drug addiction, alcoholism, and crime. Most interesting is the novel’s moral conundrum ― in a utopia, what outlet is there for youth’s restlessness and ambition, besides out and, most likely, down?" ―Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and The Revolution of Marina M.

About this edition

• Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1940660475
• ISBN 13: 9781940660479
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 291